


Sleeping Awake

by dkscully



Category: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-07
Updated: 2014-03-07
Packaged: 2018-01-14 22:28:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1281097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dkscully/pseuds/dkscully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A nightmare wakes Sarah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Awake

It's not the first time Sarah has woken in the dark of the night. Be it hurtling out of sleep, guns in hand, at the merest hint of a threat to herself or John, or catapulted out by nightmares of the future to come. She has a ritual, now. A way of dealing with it, so that there's even a slight chance that she'll get back to sleep. Because she needs to be rested, no matter what. She's the one that's keeping any hope alive. By keeping John alive. So that even if they can't avert the apocalypse, there's a chance that some of them, at least, will survive it.

So, she crawls out of the rumpled bed. The cool night air raises the hairs on her arms as she strips back the sweat damp sheets and dumps them with the rest of her laundry. Swift, neat actions, remake the bed to military standards. If she had a quarter, it would easily bounce from the crisp surface. The mental image makes her smile, as she pads out to the kitchen.

The room is dark, blinds tightly shut against the world, and she is unaware that she has company until she hears the distinctive sound of oiled metal parts sliding against one another.

Even sleep addled, her reactions are undulled. One part of her brain counts off the seconds as she pulls free one of the cached weapons and flings open the fridge to flood the room with light, before flinging her body into a roll that takes her away from the obvious line of fire to one where she can sight her enemy.

Except that when she looks down the sights, there is no enemy. Well, by some definitions, anyway.

Cameron sits at the kitchen table, much as Sarah has seen her before, wearing her most puzzled expression, a multitude of parts neatly spread out in front of her.

"Oh... it's you," manages Sarah, breathily.

"Yes."

"What were you... no, it's OK. You don't sleep, and you don't need light in order to clean your guns."

"No," says Cameron, with a minute shake of her head. "I didn't want to disturb anyone."

"Well, at least you weren't prowling the halls."

"I did that earlier."

Sarah rolls her eyes. "And?"

"The house was secure. You were asleep. Dreaming, I think. John was..."

Sarah's heartrate increases at the pause in the machine's report.

"John was pleasuring himself."

Sarah slaps one hand over her eyes and holds the other up gesturing Cameron to stop.

"Cameron," she says, scrubbing a hand through her tangled hair, "some things a mother does not need to hear about."

She looks back at the girl and is greeted with the now thoroughly familiar look of blank incomprehension.

"Where do you even get vocabulary like "pleasuring himself" from?"

Cameron cocks her head slightly. "I don't sleep. The television is very... educational."

"We get channels like that?!"

"I... made some modifications."

A shiver runs through Sarah, and she realises that she is barefoot in the kitchen in nothing more than the tanktop and skimpy shorts she sleeps in.

"Are you all right?"

The question comes with a look of concern so genuine that Sarah has to remind herelf that the girl at the kitchen table is a nothing more than a killing machine sent to help keep John alive. It has no feelings. It is not the girl that it pretends to be.

And yet, when that machine, puts down the bits of gun, carefully wipes clean her hands and places one on Sarah's forearm, she's unable to supress another shiver.

"You're cold."

"I wasn't planning to be out here this long."

Cameron is silent and the words trickle out of Sarah, unbidden.

"Couldn't sleep. Well, I was, but I woke."

"Did I disturb you?"

"No. No, it wasn't you," she says, glancing down at the hand that still rests on her arm, enjoying the comforting warmth that's spreading out from the contact.

Cameron, ever observant, catches the look. Misreading the intent, she makes to remove her hold, but Sarah places her other hand gently over it, encouraging  
her to maintain the contact.

"Nightmare," she says, with resignation, unable to maintain eye contact. "Same damned one as always. Not your fault."

Without quite realising how, she finds herself enfolded in warm, soft, welcoming, if slightly awkward arms.

"What..."

"Television," says Cameron, quietly, voice modulated to the nearness of her mouth to Sarah's ear. So near that the breath ruffles the short hairs covering it. "When someone has a bad dream, they feel better after they have been hugged."

There is a logic to this that Sarah is unable to refute, especially with her brain finally parsing, from the sensations coming from across her body, that Cameron is no more dressed that she is.

"Cameron..."

"Yes, Sarah?"

"Clothes... We've spoken about this before."

"But, Sarah, this is what you wear at night. And John sleeps in..."

"Ah! No!"

"...the nude."

Sarah shakes her head, then drops it to Cameron's shoulder.

"Need to know, Cameron. Need to know."

The silence from the robot embracing her is answer enough.

"We sleep," she continues, desperately trying to maintain her train of thought, now that Cameron has, for no reason, started to rub her back gently. "We sleep. You don't. Shouldn't you be dressed, so you can better defend us?"

"I don't need clothes to defend you."

And Sarah realises how true this is, and the ridiculousness of her suggestion. She feels it goes with the ridiculousness of the situation, stood in her kitchen, illuminated by the fridge, being comforted by a robot because she had a bad dream.

It's too damned funny, really, and suddenly she's laughing. Shaking with a mirth, that's verging on hysterical.

"Sarah?"

"It's..." she starts, but she can't stop laughing long enough to explain.

She puts her arms around Cameron to support herself, bringing them closer together, and after a moment or two, her humour has evaporated in the heat of another emotion entirely.

"Sarah?" Cameron queries again.

This time, there is a response. Not entirely unexpected by the machine who has picked up the changes in Sarah's body temperature, and heart rate, almost before the woman herself had noticed.

The first kiss is soft, and Cameron is uncertain how, or even whether, she should respond. The second kiss is more demanding, and comes with a hand twined into long dark hair, and the unfolding of subroutines she was unaware of, meshing with images from her late night television viewing. The third kiss is Cameron's, and when the girl's tongue parts her lips, Sarah is unable to stifle a moan.

"Bedroom," gasps Sara, after several more heated exchanges, the small part of her brain still functioning even slightly rationally arguing that it would be rather unfortunate to be caught by her son being fucked on the kitchen table by the robot that is supposed to be protecting him.

She is shocked by many things when Cameron picks her up and carries her to the room at back of the house, not least the combination of strength and gentleness, and the unexpected feeling of complete safety she finds in the machine's arms. There is a reverence in the way she's placed on her bed, and in the caresses that follow.

She finds herself unexpectedly worshipped. Warm hands strip her of what little clothing covers her nudity. Her mouth is bereft with the loss of the kisses, when the dark head moves lower to lavish attention on hardened nipples and the sensitised skin of a muscular belly.

When the warm mouth finds her swollen clit, all sense of the order of things is lost. Her higher brain short circuits and gives itself over in its entirety to the pleasure.

Eventually, there is nowhere else to go, and it is only Cameron's super human reactions that mean that Sarah screams her orgasm into another searing kiss rather than waking John, and in all probability, the neighbourhood.

Cameron holds the older woman though the aftershocks and long past the point where Sarah's breathing eases into the rhythms of sleep. Eventually, however, her interrupted task beckons, and Sarah wakens in the warmth of the new day alone.

On her nightstand, a freshly cleaned Glock gleams in the early morning sunlight.


End file.
